Monday, November 21, 2011

Arcade Fire: Funeral

Music can be, and in this day and age frequently is, anything. There are no limits to what can be put on a record, not by genre, lyric, or instrument. You're not beholden to any standard or expectation, not in any important way. You've got nothing holding you back except your imagination, and since you've made it that far, that attribute must be particularly strong. See, that's something music reviews seem to disregard. The most amazing thing about some albums is that they happen at all. Someone made this. They made it to say something, they made it to show themselves, they made it to sound this way. Forget what it could be or isn't. Here we are.

The first half of Arcade Fire's debut album, Funeral, seems to be bursting at the seams with anythingness. Of these five tracks, four are numbered "Neighborhoods." #1, #2 and #3 are all manic, tied together by Win Butler's excitable vocal delivery, more expressive than it is melodic. Like there's simply too much going on in his head and heart than can be rationally related. "Tunnels" is accompanied by a twinkling, swelling piano. "Laika" pulses, setting street-accordion and strings against a clanging guitar. "Power Out" is the most agitated, thundering and percussive, but set against sweet baroque strings. Here, Butler screams himself hoarse, seeming to be against the wall and running out of time (or faith in humanity.) The first respite comes between #2 and 3, a much dreamier and romantic power outage, "Une Annee Sans Lumiere," a bilingual duet between Win and wife Regine, delicate and twinkling like a streetlight on newly-fallen snow, warm like an embrace. "Kettles" provides the closing note for the first half of the album, a campfire strumming ballad of patience and timing, with some of the best lyrics to this point of the album. "Power Out" gets all the glory, but "Kettles" and "Crown of Love" get credit from me for their "eyelids" imagery (My eyes are covered by my unborn kids / But my heard keeps watching through the skin of my eyelids in this one.) The piano and guitar click along like pacing footsteps, while the strings swell up like whistling kettles (as do actual kettles.)

The eyelid imagery carries to "Crown of Love" with one of the best lyrics on the whole record: "I carved your name across my eyelids / You pray for rain, I pray for blindness." "Crown of Love" is a work of staggering beauty, climbing directionally, instead of sprawling like three of the neighbourhoods, or settling into itself like "Kettles" or "Une Annee." The second half of Funeral engages in a lot of building up and breaking down, journeys in certain directions. Both the Arcade Fire albums I've tackled here seem, appropriately, like locations as much as sounds. Places you can visit, explore and leave.

While the first half of the album is good-to-great, "Crown of Love" kicks off an excellent streak that may encompass that entire run of five tracks (depending on your opinion of a few of them.) I love the revving guitars and towering choral refrain of "Wake Up," Win Butler as preacher to the youth ("If we don't grow up / Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up... I guess they just have to adjust...") In these five, whether you like them more or less than the first five, certainly seem more planned out and steady in their direction, even as they too chart odd directions. There's the Disco segment at the end of "Crown" and "Wake Up" has a Bo Diddley-like segment. "Haiti" is an area of isolation, like an island of its own, as the strumming guitars create an almost unnaturally calm tide, under which danger lurks in Regine's distant, drowning vocals. Waves lap calmly, but the waters are full of blood.

This drifts into the titanic "Rebellion (Lies,)" the arguable centerpiece of the album, probably both the best song, and biggest showpiece for what the band is capable of when it focuses its energies. I don't mean to belittle the earlier half of the album, I wouldn't have changed a note, but there's simply no touching "Rebellion." I often find that the songs I like best are the ones I can describe least, because my appreciation for them goes beyond my ability to verbalize. And for me, that's saying something. The last track, "In the Backseat" ends the album on a suitably operatic note, going from the quietest moment of the album to, if not the loudest, then certainly among the most intense, climbing slowly and unpeeling Regine's emotional vocal.

Looking back, Funeral is an amazing opening gambit. Arcade Fire introduces themselves by roughly defining their sound, and showing what it can really do. The sound is constantly mutating, depending on what needs to be said and how. Importantly, it always sounds like itself. I think there's a definite validity to liking an album that seems to create a language of its own, especially like this one, that doesn't lose its audience along the way. Great music works off what you've already heard, then shows you something you couldn't have dreamed up. That's probably what I love about this album. Somebody had to dream it up, and I can't even imagine how you would do that, and make it work so well.

I once observed that, if you're meeting new people, just mention that you like Arcade Fire. Either they'll agree, and you'll have a new friend, or they'll disagree and you probably won't want to talk to them anymore. (This also works for the TV show Arrested Development.) In its grand design, it has a very unifying feeling to it, something that brings people together.

Buy this album now: iTunes // Amazon.com // Amazon.ca



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